Playwright Hannah Khalil: ‘I want to write roles for the really brilliant Arab women I know’

She is surely the greatest exponent of the cliffhanger: Scheherazade, the heroine of the One Thousand and One Nights, the collection of Middle Eastern folk tales. Night after night, her seductive storytelling persuades the tyrannous King Shahryār — who has embarked on a grisly plan of punishing his wife’s infidelity by marrying then murdering a virgin a day — to spare her life (and with it, the lives of all those brides to follow her) until the next instalment.

But what if? What if her creative powers threatened to run dry? That’s the conundrum imagined by playwright Hannah Khalil. “All the women behind her in line for the king’s bloody wed-bed-and-behead revenge will be wanting her to succeed,” she points out. “So what if they got together and started writing stories for Scheherazade? . . . Scheherazade’s writers’ room.”

The result is Hakawatis, Khalil’s mischievous new take on the story at Shakespeare’s Globe, in which a handful of female writers set about supplying Scheherazade with a ready stream of narratives. “Hakawati” means storyteller in Arabic and Khalil’s play invites the audience into this furnace of creativity as five women spin stories for Scheherazade, who remains an unseen but exacting presence. In the spirit of the project, Khalil has commissioned three new stories from female writers of Arab heritage (Hanan al-Shaykh, Suhayla El-Bushra and Sara Shaarawi) to sit alongside some of the traditional tales — creating, in essence, a writers’ room of her own.

The show, directed by Pooja Ghai in a co-production with Tamasha, is in part a celebration of the art of storytelling and the great oral tradition in Arabic culture. In the intimate Sam Wanamaker Playhouse — the bijou replica Jacobean indoor theatre that sits alongside Shakespeare’s Globe — the tales will unfold by candlelight, as stories have for thousands of years.

But it’s also a tribute to the importance of collaboration — particularly in theatre. Khalil has no truck with the idea of the lone artistic genius sitting in a garret crafting masterpieces. “I’ve had so many conversations with writers — particularly male — who say, ‘Hannah, you need to direct your own plays.’ And I’m like, ‘Why? Why would I do that?’ The reason I write for theatre is because of that experience of collaboration: more brains is better.”

Several of the tales collated in versions of the One Thousand and One Nights have found their way into western popular culture — most notably, Aladdin, which is a fixture on the British stage as a pantomime. But Khalil had something very different in mind.

“I was really excited about the stories we don’t know, not the ones we do,” she says. “And about trying to undercut what a western audience’s expectation is for an Arab character or an Arab story. So from the start I wanted it to be something that would turn this idea of it being for children on its head — because it never was. Those stories are dark and sexual and cheeky and kind of daring: you have lots of interesting female characters who serve themselves and who have sexual desires and needs.”

With the opening of the show, Khalil will briefly unseat the house playwright as she will have two plays running simultaneously: her family show The Fir Tree in the large open-air theatre and Hakawatis indoors. Both draw on the storytelling traditions in her own background.

Khalil was born in London to a Palestinian father and an Irish mother, and “telling stories is huge in both those cultures,” she says. “I’ve been massively influenced by writers like Conor McPherson, Marina Carr and Owen McCafferty — so many brilliant Irish playwrights who employ storytelling. There are fewer well-known plays by Palestinian writers, but again storytelling is really key in those plays.”

Khalil’s parents moved to Dubai when she was just a year old, then to Jordan. She returned to London as a teenager, with her mother, when her parents divorced. Her experience of not fully belonging in any one place has infused her writing.

“I often meet Arabs who are like, ‘Oh, you’re a bit pale,’ or ‘Your Arabic’s not good, is it?’” she says. “And in Ireland I sound English. So I feel I’m not quite accepted in either place . . . Salman Rushdie wrote a really beautiful essay called ‘Imaginary Homelands’ about his experience of feeling in-between. He talks about how if you’ve got a foot in two places, but you don’t fully exist in either, it gives you a privileged perspective.”

To date, most of Khalil’s writing has drawn on the Middle Eastern half of her roots: her 2016 play Scenes from 68* Years offered snapshots of daily life in Palestine; A Museum in Baghdad, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2019, featured a British archaeologist and an Iraqi museum director; her 2017 play The Scar Test focused on the women detained in Yarl’s Wood immigration centre. Key to her work has been a fierce desire to debunk stereotypical depictions of Arab people, particularly women, in western culture.

“It’s that idea of women who are Muslim, women who come from the Arab world, brown women, being subservient and demure and at the whim of men. I just don’t see it. Not the people in my family, not my friends. I just don’t think it’s true . . . I want to write roles for the really brilliant Arab women I know.”

Her focus is the way the women in the story individually and collectively write a different future for themselves. She would like to emphasise the wider lesson from that: for her, what drama can do is to help to break down barriers and unseat preconceptions.

“It’s anything that can make us see ‘the other’ as the same as us,” she says. “We’re in a really precarious place everywhere at the moment and if there’s one thing I want the play to be saying it’s that we are not powerless. Violence isn’t the only power. That cliché — the pen is mightier than the sword. I really believe a group of people who come to see a play can be inspired to action together. Otherwise I don’t think I’d write for theatre.”

‘Hakawatis’ runs to January 14; ‘The Fir Tree’ runs December 15-31, shakespearesglobe.com